


Unscientific Asides

by Pookaseraph



Series: Another Decade [3]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Developing Relationship, First Kiss, Jaegercon Bingo, M/M, Post-Canon, Tumblr: jaegercon, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:56:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/922253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pookaseraph/pseuds/Pookaseraph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newton and Hermann take a break on their way back from Hong Kong to Cambridge to spend time where the threat of the Jaegers al began: San Francisco, where the growing link between them finally stabilizes into something more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unscientific Asides

**Author's Note:**

> Jaegercon Bingo prompt: Ocean

Hermann was fairly certain he understood the allure of San Francisco to Newt. K-Day, Oblivion Bay, the things that sometimes attracted gawker tourists to the area held attraction to Newt as well, but since they had drifted together, Hermann knew it was deeper than that. In spite of the over-enthusiastic, manic, raw bliss that Newt seemed to get from throwing Hermann into social situations, Newt had never connected easily with people growing up - it was one of the side effects of having a PhD before he could shave, Hermann supposed - but the Kaiju had given the world a unified cause, and it was something that Newt could understand.

The tangle of Kaiju tattoos on the man's skin spoke to more than just the simple admiration - although there was admiration, and awe - it was something deeper. It wasn't a feeling or emotion that Hermann had been able to untangle, and that was with echos of the man's mind still on his own. He doubted Newt understood the full extent of his decision to paint their annihilators on his skin.

So, he was unsurprised when they spent a few days in San Francisco after finishing up at the Hong Kong Shatterdome decommissioning. It seemed to fit; the end of the Kaiju, the beginning of the Kaiju. They even abused their position to have a tour through Oblivion Bay in Oakland, to see the decommissioned - shattered - Jaegers and what little remained of the Kaiju carcasses that were evacuated from where they had fallen across the Pacific.

"They're beautiful, you know," Newt said, from where the pair of them were wrapped up in hazmat suits, Hermann using a temporary cane - uncomfortable in his gloved hand - to keep his own from being uncontaminated by the rotting Kaiju Blue.

"You have an odd concept of beauty."

"So I've been told, on numerous occasions, usually by you." Newt's voice was, as always, excited and even the radio transmitters in their respective helmets didn't diminish that, and even Newt's frantic scrambling around did not allow him to outpace Hermann as they walked.

"What do you hope to get from this, anyway?" Hermann finally asked as Newt poked his way through some rotting innards, with his gloved hands.

"I guess... just putting it to bed." Newt was silent for a long stretch - unusually long for him - which meant he was actually thinking about his words. "Don't you ever feel that way about Brawler Yukon?"

The first Jaeger; Hermann had done the majority of coding on the operating system which translated the neural impulses into actual combat action. "I do." Of course, the loss of Lt. D'Onofrio and Dr. Lightcap had been hard. The brilliant engineering mind snuffed out to try to save humanity. Hermann decided, in retrospect, that it was Dr. Lightcap's death that had finally shaken his father into supporting the Wall over Jaegers, as though Hermann would have ever been considered a suitable candidate as a Jaeger pilot or a drift partner.

He glanced over at Newt. Maybe it wasn't such an invalid fear after all. "We will need to consider new defenses," Hermann said, not really wanting to say the words, but knew they needed to be said. "You are thinking it, aren't you?"

"That we might not have seen the last of the Kaiju? The..."

"Precursors," Hermann finished. It was in their reports, it was on Marshal Hansen's desk, and the PPDC databases, but few took the threat seriously. Hansen did, Beckett, of course, but it would be up to them to carry on the torch even beyond total shut down. "It is not outside of the conceivable bounds of possibility."

"Listen to you," Newt answered, exasperated, but not actually with any heat to it. "Well, so I just... wanted to get every last piece of information before..."

"Newton!" Hermann snapped. "You have a near-constant _throbbing_ in the back of your mind where the hive-mind has pressed itself upon us, and you are playing around in innards like a twelve year old happening upon the carcass of a small animal."

He watched Newt's head bow, and Hermann could almost feel the ghost of a pressure unclenching in his own chest that would mirror in Newt's own. The phenomena was still distressing after over a month, and yet it was his new reality.

"You're right," Newt answered. "I don't know why I'm here, and I want to accomplish."

"Come on. We have our data, we have more data than we could analyze in ten lifetimes. What we need, either to assure ourselves of our safety, or prepare ourselves for the next phase, will be there, not here in a graveyard."

That seemed to finally snap Newt out of his strange Kaiju dissection fugue state, and the pair of them headed out, heading to the decontamination showers, where he found himself trying to ignore the modest temptation to glance over to where Newt was carefully scrubbing down.

It was not a new temptation, Newton, but it was one that never seemed to dominate his mind - and certainly not enough to have impressed upon the man from their Drift together - but there had always been a certain amount of attraction-admiration-want that had floated through Hermann's mind concerning Newt, no matter how much he would rather deny it.

Newt did, of course, also frustrate him endlessly, so it wasn't some issue of lust sublimated to hate, Hermann was capable of feeling both, although that was becoming less and less true. Newt was... Newt was himself, and that had always been more than enough to leave the admiration neatly stowed in the past.

Now was far more complicated. Now the vague impressions from Newt from their Drift he couldn't help but be reminded of the fact that the man was repulsively passionate, and... every single reason to not be in a relationship was slowly falling away... but then again, this was Newton he was talking about.

Hermann glowered at the shower tiles and ignored it.

Without really discussing it, the pair of them ended up back in San Francisco on one of the completed Wall segments, near a part of the ocean that hadn't been polluted with Kaiju Blue over the years, sitting, silent, but somehow... he felt as though there was nothing that he needed to say.

Newton, of course, shattered the silence long before Hermann would have preferred. "My tattoo guy died last year."

"Yes, there are, what, five, six new Kaiju to etch across your body?" Hermann asked, less dismissive than he would have been even two months ago. He understood how much Newt's desire to mark his skin came from awe that was not nearly so perverse as Hermann had originally thought.

"I was just thinking Otachi and Kodachi, actually," Newt answered. "I remember... after I drifted that first time, that I wanted to have the Anteverse tattooed onto my skin."

Hermann shook his head.

"It's always going to be in there."

He didn't answer.

"I feel the same way about Kodachi, I guess. She's still in there, rattling around somewhere. I wonder if that's what Raleigh feels for his brother."

"Very likely," Hermann answered. "Those few minutes, while its brain died and vomited its last linkages to the Kaiju hive mind, have certainly left an impression."

The two of them went back to staring across the ocean. Hermann could almost imagine he could see the Breach, could see Hong Kong, could see the waning of his life with PPDC.

"I'll miss it, too," Hermann said his mind somehow recalling a weeks' old conversation about the ocean, about Newt missing it, the Pacific in particular, not the Atlantic which they could see every day back in Cambridge.

"Better surfing," Newt said, answering as though Hermann had made it clear that he was thinking about the ocean. 

It was distressing, and yet Hermann had grown accustom to it, to he and Newton's leaps of thought and logic simply being picked up and taken as though that had better articulated his thoughts beforehand. They finished each other's sentences now. Hermann didn't perceive his own mind to be functioning any differently from normal, and yet it was also more in sync with Newton, a mind that he'd always imagined to be a frantic, jumbled chaos.

"You surf as well as you paint," Hermann answered.

"That's hurtful."

It wasn't.

"I was invited to FCCC COP this year," Newt said, out of nowhere and yet intertwined with the waves. 

Hermann wasn't sure he liked understanding the free association of Newt's mind so immediately. "The Kaiju War over, they turn, again, to saving the planet from the devastation caused both before and since to our environment?"

Newt grunted.

Hermann had never experienced so much quiet between them, not since they had met, and sometimes it was almost distressing to not hear the constant background chatter of Newton's verbal diarrhea.

"You should come with me," Newt said.

"I have no specializations related in any way to the biological and biochemical damage that has been done to every facet of our planet."

"I think better with you glowering at me."

Hermann did too. He thought better with Newt prattling at him, demanding he think harder, questioning his judgement and his math, forcing him to think beyond the obvious and the clear presentation of the data. "Fine."

Newt leaned in, just a fraction, and Hermann found himself with his arm behind Newt's back, his elbow pressed against the small of the man's back, but otherwise not touching. A moment later, Newt slung an arm over Hermann's shoulder and they fell silent again.

"You can do my math."

Hermann scoffed. "You can do your own math. Don't pretend that you don't know how. I've been inside your brain."

It was odd how infrequently they made note of that, out loud, with words, that their minds had tangled together and were still enmeshed, how it was easier when they stayed close or touched, how they just each knew what the other was thinking.

Hermann had seen it in all of the other pairs who drifted together, how they got so wrapped up in each other's heads, he just had thought it might stop, eventually, but it seemed less and less likely as the weeks moved on and one single drift seemed to have permanently twined them together.

He wondered if it was even possible for them to be apart now. He thought of Stacker, and his time after Tamsin had died; Herc after losing his son; Raleigh without his brother...

The idea was viscerally distressing.

"Hermann?"

"I'm fine."

Newt didn't protest. He just tugged Hermann closer, so their temples were close enough together to almost _feel_... it. That damn... _pull_. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on the sound of the ocean.

Hermann moved first, he knew he had, tilted his head so that he could see Newt's eyes - both green, one with the green set off by the blood-red vessels in the man's left eye - and neither of them pulled away, so close that they were breathing each other's air, so far into each other's space that they could barely claim to be two people.

Newt pulled him in, though, brought their lips together, wrong, misaligned, heads tilted incorrectly, and that was more comforting than Hermann could say, to know that it wasn't some sort of pull that demanded this, just the two of them, themselves, clashing together as they always had - misaligned and yet somehow perfect for each other.

His free hand went to the back of Newt's neck and tilted him enough to bring their mouths together, there was no permission, no requests, just mouths open, tongues not bothering to acquaint themselves, simply barging in, demanding. Newt whimpered, Hermann did not.

It took the other man no more than thirty seconds to lever himself over, legs straddling Hermann, hands grabbing his back while Hermann's arms went around Newt's neck.

Hermann lost all sense of time after that, caught in some sort of pseudo-Drift, this buzzed sense of _intimacy_ , where old thoughts, old memories - his first fumbling kiss at boarding school, Newton finally starting to realize sex existed somewhere after his first PhD - flitted around, but nothing that pulled him out of the moment, just this hazy... ocean of intimate feelings, memories, and sensations that overlaid with Newt's mouth on his, his hands fisting in the back of his sweater, and Hermann's own want mixed together. They were supposed to be like this, tangled, together...

Until they broke apart, and where Hermann thought he would have felt loss, it was instead just a stretched connection, across a few inches of space, but no less there.

A soft frown tugged down the corners of Newt's mouth, eyes squinting at Hermann as though he was a puzzle. Hermann surprised himself by answering with a faint smile, more and more frequent in Newt's presence. "I've wanted to do that for some time now," Hermann admitted.

Newt's answering smile was infectious.

"Newton?"

Newt made an acknowledging hum.

"Unscientific aside: your face has a certain... phi-ish quality."

"Phi- _ish_?"

Hermann reached up, his thumb brushing against Newt's jaw. "Well, it's hardly perfect. It's an adequate approximation." In truth, Newt's face did not fit any perfect proportion or even contain flawless symmetry, and yet Hermann enjoyed it anyway, which was more than proof of his own derangement.

"So... 1.6? 1.7?" Newt asked, more than smiling now, maybe even remembering their joke from a few days earlier, it didn't matter.

"That's within the margin of error."

"You're infuriating." But Newt leaned in and pressed a kiss at the corner of his mouth, and then tilted his head up enough to add a chaste kiss full on his mouth. "And my universal constant."

"Technically, if I'm only your subjective constant..."

Newt kissed him again, this time, no doubt, to shut him up, but it didn't matter because Newt was a firm, steady weight on his chest, and Hermann was more than willing to allow him this distraction.

The two of them, slowly, seemed to come to the mutual realization that the top of a multi-story wall was not, all told, the best place to be groping at each other like teenagers, so the two of them finally headed down on one of the many elevators that marked the wall.

"You think they'll keep it standing?" Newt asked, Hermann leaning heavily against the side of the elevator and trying to decide if he was unnerved by what they'd just done.

"I'd hope they'd use the raw materials for something _useful_." He rolled his eyes, thinking of his father, tonnes and tonnes of steel and human lives, all wasted, his father's grand monument to surrender.

"Admit it, you'd love to visit it now and then just to look up at it as a monument to your father's failure." 

Newt knew him too well; he'd used it to wind Hermann up in the past, used it to wind up Hermann's father just a few days ago, but here, an ocean away from that, standing beside his...

His...

His co-pilot, if you would, everything seemed to just click into place. "Maybe a small monument."

"Knew it, Dude."

Hermann sighed, exasperated, but somehow more than willing to go along with this to let himself... drift. The muffled little snort couldn't have escaped Newton's hearing, and yet he did not comment on it.

Dinner and arguing; returning to their shared room at a hotel and arguing; responding to scientific reviews and emails and arguing. Yet it was always... comforting.

Newt ended up stripped down to the waist, which wasn't entirely unusual, but more distracting after their kiss on the wall. The expanse of his back, not yet filled with Kaiju tattoos seemed almost empty to Hermann, and he stared at it, the vertebrae of his back, the minimal muscles, tense from hunching over computers or dissections.

"Are we going to talk about this?" Hermann asked, finally. Unwilling to allow this to collapse into some strange, unspoken state where they'd come together, do something, and then pull back apart again.

"Well, Hermann," Newt turned around, leaning over his knees, glasses perched just slightly askew. "I suppose here is where we make our hypotheses, and arguments, and then one of us is wrong."

Ten years by this man's side, off and on, fighting Kaiju, a few minutes in this man's brain; Hermann supposed he could find it in him to be honest. "I am attracted to you, Newton, God help me."

Newt didn't seem to mind, certainly hadn't moved away. Hermann had had no particular insights into the man's sexuality from their Drift, it was always something that had been back-burnered for him in the wake of Kaiju and studies and one more thing to do. It was one thing that the man seemed to have missed out on, always too young or two advanced for his potential partners. "Drift thing?"

"Not unless you've somehow impressed a warped recollection of the last few years on me," Hermann answered. "Although Pons use can impact some habits and base impulses, there is no evidence it impacts pure memory reca--"

Newt was smirking over at him. "Years?"

"Oh shut up."

"No, no... just trying to figure out if we could have been fucking for years."

"Don't be crass." That was just it, years ago it would have been 'fucking', would have been the two of them working out simple aggression with no true understanding, two halves with no link between them. It was a comfort, though, to say that Newt had been attracted to him as well.

"That's all it would have been though," Newt finished. "You're..." he rapped his knuckles against the side of his head.

"Yes, it would be different."

"Except for the bitching."

"That would remain a constant."

Newt closed down his laptop, and came to stand a few feet from where Hermann was stretched out on his bed, leg slightly elevated. "I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to be with someone else."

"So then I am the last man on earth."

"Really, Mr. Darcy?"

"You haven't read Austen."

"But you have," Newt answered.

"Then... we'll figure this out, like we always do."

Newt invited himself onto Hermann's bed, and after a moment began to massage the muscles above Hermann's knee. "Can't be harder than stopping an interdimensional army of cloned monsters from destroying the planet."

"You say that now."

Hermann reached out, and Newt leaned forward, his hand brushed across Newt's side, feeling subtle difference in the tattooed skin compared to the pink of untattooed skin. He had known, intellectually, that there would be a difference there, not that they had ever touched like this before, but it wasn't as odd or distressing as it might have been.

The kiss this time was barely a brush of lips against each other, Newt over him, Hermann's hands resting gently on his hips, and it was ridiculous how easy it was to fall into this, again: sniping, sarcasm, science, kissing... maybe that should have bothered him.

After a few moments, he rested his head on his pillow, looking up at Newt where the man was waiting, a foot or so between them. "You do realize it took us over a decade to work out the interdimensional clone apocalypse, right?" He asked, up towards Newt.

"I figure you have more experience admitting I'm right now."

Hermann opened his mouth, primed, _charged_ to argue, but Newt just smirked, and Hermann shoved him off onto the bed beside him, Newt went without argument. "You're sleeping on the couch."

The two of them ended up together on Hermann's bed, Hermann arguing over Newt's shoulder about their scientific response to one of their newer papers while Hermann tried to make heads or tails of Anteverse gravity based on Gipsy's readings. Sleep was a tangle of limbs, Hermann's fingers carded through Newt's hair, Newt's body sprawled in every direction with Newt's head a drooling mess across Hermann's chest.

It was easy to imagine it as floating, a warm, buzzed feeling that he got from Newt's head pressed to his chest, and he ran his free hand down the man's spine, feeling the ridge of vertebrae, the smooth, unmarked skin, and the ghost urge from Newt to memorialize something on that empty space.

Otachi, certainly, the creature had nearly killed Newt, imprinted on him as she was stitched together, Precursors curious about how this one human's mind worked above all others. Hermann didn't like to think about what might have been Newton's fate at Otachi's hands... claws. Perhaps the smaller Kaiju as well, Otachi Jr., or Kodachi as Newt had talked Tendo into naming it.

They had shared that, together, the most intimate connection that two humans could share, shared it with that dying mind, shared that with each other. The two of them adrift and floating, at sea together and never quite able to connect to another human the same way again.

To Newton, there was an appeal to that being etched into the skin, and it was not one that Hermann had ever imagined sharing, but now... he traced the ridge of one of Newt's shoulder blades, and considered.

It was enough to rouse Newt, and earn a brush of his nose against Hermann's sternum, and then a questioning hum.

An admission that he was considering - _considering_ \- a tattoo, would no doubt cause Newt to snap to full wakefulness in an instant, and then nothing would do but for him to plan, plot, and decide exactly where Hermann should receive said tattoo, which would serve Newton no good - the times when the man actually put his head down and slept had been few and far between in their many years together - and Hermann was in no mood to discuss it.

"You're absolutely right, to go sleep."

Unsurprisingly, that had the desired placating effect, and Newt gave a happy little noise before falling back asleep.

Tomorrow, they would have one last goodbye to their ocean, and head back to Cambridge to continue their research, their bickering, and whatever this was that had started between them.


End file.
